"Uhuh."
"The Germans keep lobbing sh.e.l.ls into Dover," Burnecker said. "Are you sure you"re going there?"
"Uhuh." Noah waved at them and went out of the tent. "See you Monday ..."
Burnecker looked puzzledly after him. Then he shrugged. "That man"s troubles," he said, "have unseated his reason." He lay down and in a minute and a half he was sleeping.
Noah slipped out of the clean, old, wood and brick hotel just as the sun was rising out of France.
He walked down the stone street toward the Channel. It had been a quiet night, with a thin fog. He had gone to the restaurant in the center of the town where a three-piece band had played and British soldiers and their girls had danced on the large floor. Noah had not danced. He had sat by himself, sipping unsweetened tea, smiling shyly when he caught a girl looking at him invitingly, and ducking his head. He liked to dance, but he had decided sternly that it would have been unseemly to be whirling around a floor with a girl in his arms at the very moment, perhaps, that his wife was at her crisis of birth and agony, and the first cry of his child was heard in the world.
He had gone back to the hotel early, pa.s.sing the sign on the bandstand that read, "All Dancing Will Cease During Sh.e.l.l"ing."
He had locked himself in his cold, bare room and got into bed with a feeling of great luxury, alone, at ease, with no one to order him to do anything until Monday night. He had sat up in bed, writing a letter to Hope, remembering the hundreds of letters he had written her when he had first met her. "I am sitting up in bed," he wrote, "in a real bed; in a real hotel, my own man for three days, writing this, thinking of you. I cannot tell you where I am, because the Censor wouldn"t like it, but I think I can safely tell you that there is a fog over the land tonight, that I have just come from a restaurant where a band was playing Among My Souvenirs, and where there was a sign that read All Dancing Will Cease During Sh.e.l.ling. I think I can also tell you that I love you.
"I am very well and although they have worked us very hard for the last three weeks, I actually have gained four pounds. I will probably be so fat when I get home, neither you nor the child will recognize me.
"Please do not worry about it"s being a girl. I will be delighted with a girl. Honestly. I have been giving great thought to the child"s education," he wrote earnestly, bent over the pad in the flickering dim light, "and this is what I have decided. I do not like the new-fangled ideas in education that are inflicted upon children today. I have seen examples of what they do to unformed minds, and I would want to save our child from them. The idea of allowing a child to do whatever comes into its head, in order to permit free expression, seems to me to be absolutely nonsensical. It makes for spoiled, whining and disrespectful children," Noah wrote out of the depths of his twenty-three-year-old wisdom, "and is based, anyway, on a false notion. The world, certainly, will not permit any child, even ours, to behave completely according to its own desires, and to lead a child to believe that is the case is only to practice a cruel deception upon it. I am against nursery schools, too, and kindergartens, and I think we can teach the child all it has to know for the first eight years better than anyone else. I am also against forcing a child to read too early in life. I hope I do not sound too dogmatic, but we have never had the time to discuss this with each other and argue out any of the points and compromise on them.
"Please, darling, do not laugh at me for writing so solemnly about a poor little life that may not, at the moment I wrote this, have even begun. But this may be my last pa.s.s in a long time, and the last time I will be able to have the peace and quiet to think sensibly about this subject.
"I am certain, dearest," Noah wrote slowly and carefully, "that it will be a fine child, straight of limb, quick of mind, and that we shall love it very much. I promise to return to him and to you with a whole body and a whole heart. I know I shall, no matter what happens. I shall return to help with the diapers, to tell him stories at bedtime, to feed him spinach and teach him how to drink milk out of a gla.s.s, to take him out in the Park on Sundays and tell him the names of the animals in the zoo, to explain to him why he must not hit little girls and why he must love his mother as much as his father does.
"In your last letter you wrote that you were thinking of calling the child after my father if he was a boy. Please do not do that I was not very fond of my father, although he undoubtedly had his good points, and I have been trying to run away from him all my life. Call him Jonathan, after your father, if you wish. I am a little frightened of your father, but I have admired him warmly ever since that Christmas morning in Vermont.
"I am not worried for you. I know you will be wonderful. Do not worry about me. Nothing can happen to me now.
Love, Noah."
"P.S. I wrote a poem this evening" before dinner. My first poem. It is a delayed reaction to a.s.saulting, fortified positions. Here it is. Don"t show it to anyone. I"m ashamed.
Beware the heart"s sedition, It is not made for war: Fear the fragile tapping At the brazen door.
That"s the first stanza. I"ll write two more stanzas today and send them to you. Write me, darling, write me, write me, write me ..."
He had folded the letter neatly and got out of bed and put it in his blouse pocket. Then he had put out the light and hurried back between the warm sheets.
There had been no sh.e.l.ling during the night. Around one in the morning the sirens had gone off, but only for some planes that had raided London and were on their way home and had crossed the coast ten miles to the west. No guns had been fired.
Noah touched the bulge of the letter under his coat as he walked down the street. He wondered if there was an American Army unit in town where he could have it censored. He always felt a twinge of distaste when he thought of the officers of his own company, whom he did not like, reading his letters to Hope.
The sun was up by now, burning under the slight mist. The houses shone palely, swimming up into the morning. Noah pa.s.sed the neatly cleaned-out foundations where four houses had been knocked down by sh.e.l.lfire. Now, finally, he thought, as he pa.s.sed the ruins, I am in a town that is at war.
The Channel lay out beneath him, gray and cold. He could not see the coast of France, through the thinning haze over the water. Three British torpedo boats, small and swift, were slicing into their concrete berths in the harbor. They had been out the night before, ranging the enemy coast, in a pale, blazing wake of foam, in a swirling confusion of swinging searchlights, streams of tracer bullets, underwater torpedo explosions that had sent black fountains of water three hundred feet in the air. Now they were coming in mildly, in the Sunday morning sunlight, at quarter-speed, looking playful and holiday-like, like speedboats at a summer resort.
A town at war, Noah repeated silently.
At the end of the street there was a bronze monument, dark and worn by the Channel winds. Noah read the inscription, which solemnly celebrated the British soldiers who had pa.s.sed this spot on their way to France in the years between 1914 and 1918.
And again, in 1939, Noah thought, and on the way back, in 1940, from Dunkerque. What monument would a soldier read in Dover twenty years from now, what battles would they bring to his mind?
Noah kept walking. He had the town to himself. The road climbed up the famous cliffs out across the windswept meadows that reminded Noah, as so much of England did, of a park kept in good repair by a careful, loving, and not very imaginative gardener.
He walked swiftly, swinging his arms. Now, without the rifle, without the pack, without the helmet and canteen and bayonet scabbard, walking seemed like a light and effortless movement, a joyous, spontaneous expression of the body"s health on a winter morning.
When he reached the top of the cliff, the mist had disappeared and the Channel sparkled playfully, blue and glittering all the way to France. In the distance stood the cliff of Calais. Noah stopped and stared across the water. France was amazingly near-by. As he watched he could almost imagine that he saw a truck, moving slowly, along a climbing road, past a church whose steeple rose into the washed air. Probably it would be an Army truck, he thought, and in it German soldiers. Probably on their way to church. It was a queer sensation, to look at enemy ground, even at this distance, and know that, in their gla.s.ses, they could probably see you, and all in a kind of trance-like, distance-born truce. Somehow, you could not help but feel that in a war, so long as you could see the enemy, or he you, killing should follow immediately. There was something artificial, spuriously arranged, about this peaceful observation of each other; it was an aspect of war that left you uneasy and dissatisfied. In a curious way, Noah thought, it would make it harder to kill them later.
He stood on the top of the cliff, regarding the doubtful, clear coast of Europe. The town of Calais, with its docks and spires and rooftops and bare trees rising into the wartime sky, lay still in its Sunday-morning quietness, just like the town of Dover below him. He wished Roger were here with him today. Roger would have had something to say, some obscure, significant point of information about the two linked towns, twins through history, sending fishing smacks, tourists, amba.s.sadors, soldiers, pirates, high explosive, back and forth at each other across the years. How sad that Roger had been sent to die among the palm trees and jungle moss of the Philippines. How much more fitting, if he had to die, if the bullet had reached him as he stormed the beach of the France he had loved so well, or been struck down riding into a country village near Paris, smiling, looking for the proprietor of the cafe he had drunk with all one summer-or if he had been in Italy when his death had reached him, fighting perhaps in the very fishing village through which he had pa.s.sed up to Rome on his way from Naples in the autumn of 1936, recognizing the church, the city hall, the face of a girl, as he fell ... Death, Noah realized, had its peculiar degrees of justness, and Roger"s death had been low on that particular scale. "You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell mola.s.ses candy, But, honey, are you makin" any money, Tha"s all I want to know ..."
Later, Noah decided, after the war, he would come back to this place with Hope. I stood here, in this exact spot, and it was absolutely quiet, and there was France, looking just the way it looks now. I don"t know to this day exactly why I picked Dover for what might have been my last pa.s.s. I don"t know ... curiosity, maybe, a desire to see what it was like. A town at war, really at war, a look at the place where the enemy was ... I"d been told so much about them, how they "fought, what weapons they used, what horrors they"d committed-I wanted at least to see the place where they were. And, then sometimes there was sh.e.l.ling, and I"d never heard a gun fired in anger, as they used to say in the Army ...
No, Noah decided, we won"t talk about the war at all. We"ll walk here hand in hand, on a summer"s day, and sit down next to each other on the cropped gra.s.s, and look out across the Channel and say, "Look, you can almost see the church steeple in France. Isn"t it a lovely afternoon ..."
The sound of an explosion shivered the quiet. Noah looked down at the harbor. A slow, lazy puff of smoke, small and toylike in the distance, was rising from the spot where the sh.e.l.l had hit among some warehouses. Then there was another explosion and another. The puffs of smoke blossomed in a random pattern throughout the roofs of the town. A chimney slowly crumbled, top faraway to make a sound, collapsing softly like bricks made out of candy. Seven times the explosions sounded. Then there was silence again. The town seemed to go back without an effort into its Sabbath sleep.
The Germans on the other side of the water, their malice satisfied or their anger cooled by the martial display, cleaned their guns and waited.
No answer came from the British guns. The dust clouds sent swirling up by the sh.e.l.ls subsided, and in five minutes it was almost impossible to believe that anything had happened.
Slowly, trying to fix in his mind the exact impression of what the explosions had looked and sounded like, Noah began to descend the hill into the town. It had all seemed so remote, so childishly spiteful, without plan ... Is that it? he couldn"t help thinking, as he braced himself against the grade, striding downwards, Is that what a war is like?
The town was awake by now. Two old ladies in black feathered bonnets, carrying prayer books in net-gloved hands, swept sedately toward church. A tall Marine Commando Lieutenant, with his arm in a white sling, rolled swiftly and debonairly past, beautifully uniformed, on a bicycle. A very small girl, held in tow by a church-bound aunt, looked up at Noah and offered, gravely, British childhood"s ritualistic greeting to the American Army, "Any gum, Chum?"
"Harriet!" said the aunt coldly.
Noah grinned and shook his head at the small blonde creature being dragged off to worship.
A family group poured through a tall black door into the street, father, mother and a staggered ladder of children from the age of four to ten. The father held the hand of the smallest child. He had a round belly under decent broadcloth, and his face was sleepy and complacent under an ancient, wonderfully brushed hat. The mother circled the flock of children, like a collie dog, herding them down the street toward their prayers.
A very pretty girl with bare legs and a loose coat pa.s.sed absent-mindedly through the group reading the Sunday Times as she walked.
A British Sergeant, with the standard British Sergeant"s face, cool, reserved, stiff with authority and competence, walked rigidly on the other side of the street, his wife on his arm. His wife was young, and Noah could tell she was trying to live up to the portentous Manual-Of-Arms bearing of her husband. But her face kept breaking into smiling life as she looked side-wise at her husband, and the effect was incongruous and appealing, like a child with colored ribbons in her braids, mounted on a spry and s.h.a.ggy Shetland pony, who has by accident strayed into a parade of armored vehicles.
"Good morning, good morning," the citizens of the town said on their a.s.saulted thoroughfares. "Isn"t it a lovely day? I hear they hit poor Mrs. Finchley"s fishmarket again. Well, now isn"t it nice to have your Albert back with you for the weekend? Isn"t it nice that the fog has gone? You can see France today. We are going to go up after dinner and look. Yes, I. heard from Sidney. Quite well, thank you, quite well, they took the last st.i.tches out of the wound three weeks ago, and they are sending him to Calcutta on his convalescent leave ... My Roberta has her American Sergeant down with her again this week-end and he brought a large can of that delicious American fruit salad and a whole carton of Chesterfields. A lovely boy, a lovely, lovely boy, and he says the permission ought to come through in about a month, now, you know how slow armies are, and they"re to be married here, if it"s before the invasion, I"ve already asked Reverend Redwine. Good morning, good morning, good morning ..."
Noah stopped in front of the church. It was a squat, stone building, with a heavy, square tower. It looked as though the G.o.d who was addressed within it was a forbidding Old Testament G.o.d, Who laid the Law down squarely and with no frills or subtleties to the long generations of Channel-side worshipers; a Coast and Cliff G.o.d, a coldwater and storm G.o.d, long on justice and rationed in mercy. There was an air-raid shelter on the lawn, and rolls of zig-zagging barbed-wire fences near the rectory at the back, and menacing-looking concrete pyramids of tank blocks at the corner of the lawn, to stop the Germans who had never climbed the cliff as they had promised to do in 1940.
The service was already on, and they were singing a hymn to the accompaniment of an organ within. The soprano of women"s and children"s voices over the deeper rumble of the organ and the men, seemed surprisingly delicate and frivolous, coming from the angular, gray stone. On an impulse that he did not examine, Noah went in.
The congregation was small, and Noah sat down on one of the empty oak benches in the rear of the church. Many of the windows were broken, some patched with cardboard, others merely glittering edges of gla.s.s in heavy lead frames. The wind off the Channel, freighted with salt, gusted in through the holes, ruffling veils and Bible pages, flicking at the long white hair of the minister, who stood rather dreamily in the pulpit, rocking softly on his heels with the hymn, looking, with his thin, parchment face, and his blowing white hair, like an ancient pianist or astronomer, too deep in fugues or stars to remember to go to the barber.
Noah had never gone to synagogue. His father"s overblown, rhetorical intimacy with religious literature had clouded over the idea of G.o.d in Noah"s mind early in life. And he had never even spoken to a Chaplain, Jewish or Christian, in the Army. They had always seemed too bluff, too hearty, too soldierly and mundane, too much like any other Captain or Troop Commander, to offer spiritual comfort of any kind to Noah. He always felt that if he went to any one of them and cried, "Father, I have sinned," or "Father, I am afraid of h.e.l.l," they would have clapped him on the back, quoted an Army regulation, and sent him out to clean his rifle.
Noah hardly listened to the service. He stood with the others, sat down with the others, listened, without bothering to follow the words, to the pulsating sweet minors of the hymns, and kept his eyes on the weary, delicate face of the minister, lit palely by the winter sea sun that drifted down through the gaping windows above his head.
There was a final rustling among the congregation, a shifting of prayer books, a scuffling of feet, a hush-hush among the children, and the minister leaned reflectively on the pulpit, his large, bleached hands gripping the polished dark wood, and began his sermon.
At first Noah did not follow the words. His mind seemed to be in the state in which he often listened to music, not following the melody exactly, or the unfolding development of the composer"s statements, but stirred by the abstract sound into a separate stream of images of the mind"s own-making. The minister had a low, old man"s voice, gentle and intimate, lost for moments on end in the rush of wind from the broken windows. It was a voice without professional pa.s.sion or exhortation, a voice that seemed to address G.o.d and his congregation out of a fresh reflection, with no echoes of past devotion in it, a voice free of the lumber of the old sermons and ceremony, a truly religious and unchurchly voice.
"... love," the old man was saying, "is the word of Christ and it admits of no divisions, no slyness of calculation, no diversity of interpretation. We are told to love our neighbor as ourself and our enemy as our brother, and the words and the meaning are as plain as an iron weight in the scale in which our actions are balanced.
"We are Channel-dwellers, but we do not dwell on the banks of the Channel, we live among the sea moss and polished wrecks, among the waving salt ferns and bitter bones of the drowned at the dark bottom, and above us roll the deep torrents of man"s hatred of man and G.o.d. Our tide now comes all from the north and nourishes us on the polar juice of despair. We live among the guns and the bra.s.s sound of their speaking drowns out the soft voice of G.o.d, and only the wild crying of vengeance can be heard above their thunder. We see our cities crumble under the enemy"s bombs, and we mourn for our children struck at their early tasks by the enemy"s bullets, and we strike back, cruelly and wildly, from the seabed of our hatred, at his cities and his children. The enemy is more savage than the tiger, hungrier than the shark, crueler than the wolf; in honor and in defense of our moderate way of life, we stand up to him and combat him, but in doing so we out-tiger him, out-shark the shark, over-wolf the wolf. Will we at the end of all this then pretend to ourselves that the victory is ours? The thing we defend perishes from our victory as it would never perish from our defeat. Can we sit here, deep in our underwater hardness of heart, and think that our Sunday words swim up to G.o.d, after we have spent the week killing the innocent, dropping the bombs on the churches and the museums, burning the libraries, burying the children and the mothers in the jagged steel and broken concrete which is the special filth of our century?
"Do not boast to me in your newspapers of the thousands of tons of bombs you have let loose at random on the unhappy land of Germany, because I will tell you that you have let loose those bombs on me, on your church, on yourselves and on your G.o.d. Tell me, rather, how you have wept for the single German soldier you have been forced to kill as he stood before you armed and dangerous, and I will say, you are my defender and the defender of my church and my England.
"I see several soldiers among the congregation and I know they have a right to ask, What is love for a soldier? How does a soldier obey the word of Christ? How does a soldier love his enemy? I say it is this way-to kill sparingly and with a sense of sin and tragedy, sin that is yours equally with the sin of the man who falls at your hand. For was it not your indifference, your weakness of spirit, your greed, your deafness earlier in the day which armed him and drove him into the field to slay you? He struggled, he wept, he cried out to you, and you said, "I hear nothing. The voice does not carry across the water." Then, in his despair, he picked up the rifle, and, then, finally, you said, "His voice is clear. Now let us kill him."
"Do not," the old man said, his voice mild and growing weaker, "do not feel righteous in your heart because of this late and b.l.o.o.d.y attention you pay him. Kill, if you must, because in our weakness and in our error, we have found no other road to peace, but kill remorsefully, kill with a sense of sorrow, kill with economy for the immortal souls who leave this life in battle, carry mercy in your cartridge cases, forgiveness in your knapsacks, kill without revenge, because vengeance is not yours but the Lord"s, kill, knowing that each life you spend makes your life that much the poorer.
"Come up, children, up from the Channel-bed cast off from the wrecks below, struggle up from the sea-fern jungle, nourish yourselves on a wanner current. Though we strive against butchers, let us not wet our hands in butchery. Let us not make ghosts of our enemies, let us rather make of them our brothers. If we carry the sword of G.o.d in our hands, as we boast, let us remember that it is a n.o.ble steel, let us not have it turn in our English hands into the slaughterer"s busy knife."
The old man sighed and shivered a little, his hair blowing in the wind from the windows. He gazed abstractedly over the heads of the congregation, as though he had forgotten, in his old man"s cluttered, almost dreaming way, that they were there. Then he smiled gently down at the half-empty pews.
He led the congregation in a prayer and a closing hymn, but Noah hardly heard. The minister"s words had set up in him an excitement, a trembling tenderness toward the old man, toward the people around him, toward the soldiers standing beside their guns here and across the Channel, toward everything living and about to die. It filled him with a mysterious sense of hope. Logically, he did not agree with what the old man had said. Committed to killing, a target himself, knowing the confusion in design of such a war as he was fighting, he felt that it was almost impossible to be as strict and rigorous in attack as the old man desired, felt, too, that to attempt it would put too much of a burden on his own Army"s shoulders, give the enemy too easy an advantage at a time when such an advantage might one day cost him his own life. Still, the minister"s sermon filled him with hope. If, at such a time, in such a place, where the smoke from the last seven malicious sh.e.l.ls had barely cleared, in a church already chipped and broken by war, among soldiers already wounded and civilians already bereft, if, at such a time, in such a place, there lived a man who could speak so pa.s.sionately for brotherhood and mercy, and who could speak without fear of retribution or restriction, then, indeed, the world was not lost. Across the Channel, Noah knew, no man could raise his voice thus, and across the Channel were the men who were finally going to go down in defeat. The world was not going to fall into their hands, but into the hands of the people who sat nodding, a little sleepily, perhaps, a little dully, before their ancient preacher. So long, Noah thought, as such voices could be raised in the world, stern, illogical and loving, so long might his own child live in confidence and hope ...
"Amen," said the minister.
"Amen," chorused the congregation.
Noah stood up slowly and went out. He stopped at the door and waited. Outside, a child with a bow and arrow was aiming at one of the tank blocks. He fired and missed, retrieved the arrow and took careful aim again.
The minister came to the door and stood there, shaking hands gravely with his parishioners as they filed past him to their rationed Sunday roasts. His hair blew more wildly than ever in the strong wind, and Noah saw that his hands shook badly. He looked very old and very frail.
Noah waited until all the congregation had scattered. Then, just as the minister was turning to go in, Noah went up to him.
"Sir," he said softly, not knowing exactly what he wanted to say, not being able to put into words the shimmering confusion of grat.i.tude and hope that was shaking him, "Sir, I ... I wanted to wait and ... I"m sorry I can"t say it better ... thank you ..."
The old man looked soberly at him. His eyes were dark, pouched in waxen wrinkles, farsighted and tragic. He nodded his head slowly and shook Noah"s hand. His hand was dry and transparently fragile and Noah shook it very carefully.
"Ah, good," said the minister. "Thank you. It is to you young men that I speak, because it is you who have to make the decisions ... Thank you." He peered curiously at Noah"s uniform. "Ah ..." he said politely, "Canadian?"
Noah couldn"t help smiling. "No, Sir," he said, "American."
"American. Ah," said the old man, a little puzzled. "Ah, yes." Noah had the feeling that the old man had not quite digested the fact that America was in the war, that he had been told and forgotten a dozen times, that all uniforms seemed like the same drab blur to him. "Ah, welcome, welcome," the old man said warmly and vaguely. "Welcome, indeed. Ah," he said, suddenly glancing up at the windows of the church behind him, "we must get some new windows, it must have been a terrible draught inside."
"No, Sir," said Noah, and again he could not help smiling. "I didn"t notice it at all."
"Good of you," said the minister, "good of you to say so. America?" Again that slight, polite note of puzzlement. "G.o.d bless you, Son, and return you safe to your home and your loved ones after the terrible days that lie ahead." He started in. Then, suddenly, he turned and came back. He stared almost harshly at Noah. "Tell me truthfully, Son," he said, and he sounded crisply alert, like a young, energetic man, "tell me, do you think I am a babbling old fool?" He gripped Noah"s arms with surprising steadiness and strength.
"No, Sir," said Noah softly. "I think you are a great man."
The old man stared piercingly at Noah, as though he was hunting down any trace of mockery or patronage for his age and his old-fashioned, outmoded opinions in Noah"s face. Then he seemed to be satisfied with what he saw. He took his hands away from Noah"s arms and tried to smile, but his face trembled, his eyes clouded over.
"Son, Son," he whispered ... He shook his head. "An old man," he said, "sometimes an old man hardly knows what world he is living in, whether he is speaking for the grave or the cradle ... I look down into my congregation and I see faces that have been dead fifty years and for awhile I speak to them, until I remember. How old are you, Son?"
"Twenty-three, Sir," said Noah.
"Twenty-three," said the minister, reflectively, "twenty-three." He put out his hand slowly and touched Noah"s cheek. "A living face. Living. I will pray for your safety."
"Thank you, Sir," said Noah.
"Sir," said the minister. "Sir. I suppose they teach you that in the Army."
"Yes, Sir," said Noah.
"How ugly," the minister said. "Ah, G.o.d, how I hate armies." He blinked, and seemed to forget for a moment whom he was talking to. He looked around vaguely. "Come again, some Sunday," he said, his voice very tired, "perhaps we will have the windows back." He turned abruptly and shuffled in through the dark hole of the doorway.
When he got back to camp, Noah found a cable waiting for him. It had taken seven days to reach him. He opened it clumsily, feeling the blood jumping in his wrists and fingertips. A boy, he read, six and a half pounds, I feel magnificent, I love you, love you. Hope.
He walked dazedly out of the orderly room.
After supper, he distributed the cigars. He made a careful point of giving cigars to all the men whom he had fought back in Florida. Brailsford wasn"t there, because he had been transferred back in the States, but all the rest of the men took them with a surprised, uneasy shyness, and they shook his hand with dumb, warm congratulation, as though they, too, shared the wonder, so far away, in the fine English rain, among the a.s.sembled instruments of destruction, of the state of fatherhood.
"A boy," said Donnelly, the Golden-Gloves heavyweight, the flame-thrower, shaking Noah"s hand numb in his terrible, friendly fist, "a boy. What do you know about that? A boy! I hope the poor little son of a b.i.t.c.h never has to wear a uniform like his old man. Thank you," soberly sniffing the gift, "thanks a lot. This is a great cigar."
But at the last moment Noah could not bring himself to offer cigars to Sergeant Rickett or Captain Colclough. He gave three to Burnecker, instead. He smoked one himself, the first of his life, and went to sleep slightly dizzy, his head wavering in smoky, thick visions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
THE DOOR OPENED and Gretchen Hardenburg stood there in a gray wrap.
"Yes," she said, opening the door only part way and peering out. "What is it?"
"h.e.l.lo," Christian said, smiling. "I just arrived in Berlin."
Gretchen opened the door a little more widely and looked closely at him. After a perceptible moment, during which she looked at his shoulder boards, a faint light of recognition crossed her face. "Ah," she said. "The Sergeant. Welcome." She opened the door, but before Christian could kiss her, she extended her hand. They shook hands. Her hand was bony and seemed to be shaken by some slight, interior ague.
"For a moment," she apologized, "the light in the hall ... And, you"ve changed." She stepped back and looked at him critically. "You"ve lost so much weight. And your color ..."
"I had jaundice," Christian said shortly. He hated his color himself, and didn"t like people to remark about it. This was not how he had imagined the first minute with Gretchen, caught at the door this way, in a sharp discussion of his unpleasant complexion. "Malaria and jaundice. That"s how I got to Berlin. Sick leave. I just got off the train. This is the first place I"ve been ..."
"How flattering," Gretchen said automatically, pushing her hair, which was uncombed, back from her face. "Very nice of you to have come."
"Aren"t you going to ask me in?" Christian said. Begging again, he thought bitterly, as soon as I lay eyes on her.
"Oh, I"m so sorry." Gretchen laughed shrilly. "I was napping, and I suppose I"m still dazed. Of course, of course, come in ..."
She closed the door behind him and put her hand familiarly on his arm, pressing it firmly. It may still be all right, Christian thought, as he went into the well-remembered room, maybe she was surprised in the beginning and now she"s getting over it.
Once in the living room he made a move toward her, but she dipped away and lit a cigarette and sat down.
"Sit down, sit down," she said. "My pretty Sergeant. I often wondered what had happened to you."